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Everything I Know about Leadership,
I Learned from the Movies
By Leigh Buchanan, senior editor
at Inc. and Mike Hofman, staff writer at Inc.
Want to inspire your organization?
Earn the undying loyalty of employees? Turn crises into triumphs?
Start by renting these 10 videos.
Every year around
Christmas, Susan Schreter takes a refresher course in leadership.
Her teacher is always the same: George Bailey, the sweetly
earnest hero of It's a Wonderful Life, who risks his
livelihood to prove that compassionate banking need not be
an oxymoron. "Every time I see that movie, I want to be more
like George," says Schreter, CEO of Coupons4Everything.com,
a Seattle-based start-up that offers coupons and rebates for
consumer goods over the Web. "He reminds me that the important
thing is to be respected, not as a rich entrepreneur but as
a socially minded, successful member of a community."
Schreter's paean
to the saint of Bedford Falls came in response to a recent
Inc. survey that asked small-company CEOs and senior
executives to name the movies that inspired business leaders
best. The question isn't a frivolous one: movies -- like Shakespeare
-- are becoming a staple of business school curricula, as
professors screen Wall Street to teach ethics and leaven
Tom Peters with Tom (Jerry Maguire) Cruise. "Films
are a catalyst. They present dramatic problems, crises, and
turnarounds," explains John K. Clemens, who incorporates works
like Hoosiers and Citizen Kane into his graduate
management and executive education courses at Hartwick College,
in Oneonta, N.Y., and is the coauthor of Movies to Manage
By: Lessons in Leadership from Great Films (NTC/Contemporary
Publishing Group, 1999). "Films beg to be interpreted and
discussed, and from those discussions businesspeople come
up with principles for their own jobs."
Academic validation
notwithstanding, we expected the cold shoulder when we recently
asked approximately 100 readers to don Roger Ebert hats. Company
builders, after all, are generally too busy to haunt the local
cineplex, let alone mull the business implications of what
they might see there. Or so we thought. To our surprise, almost
two-thirds of those surveyed responded, many almost immediately.
Some wrote or called several times to tweak their lists, while
others left impassioned voice mail messages extolling their
favorites. "If you haven't seen it, rent it today," these
messages almost invariably concluded.
A few respondents
described movies that had influenced their professional lives.
One CEO said that Baby Boom, in which Diane Keaton
trades the corporate piranha pool for motherhood and a gourmet
baby food start-up, inspired her to go into business for herself.
Another used insights gleaned from the Bill Murray comedy
What About Bob? -- about a psychiatric patient tormenting
his shrink -- to help him cope with a problem employee.
More often,
however, readers praised films that grapple with ethical and
personal quandaries played out by realistically nuanced characters.
"The best leadership films deal with the fundamentals, such
as the presence or absence of integrity and trust," says Clemens.
"In Citizen Kane, for example, you see the classic
trajectory of early integrity followed by its loss as the
character climbs the power grid. In Dead Poets Society,
Keating, an English teacher at a prep school, is fired, and
there's a suicide. But he has enormous integrity. And at the
end you have to ask yourself, 'Did he succeed or fail?' --
which is a wonderful question for anyone interested in leadership."
Readers, no
doubt, will disagree with the inclusion of some of the films
listed here and become apoplectic over the exclusion of others.
But that's to be expected. As the Academy Awards remind us
each year: Filmmaking is both an art and a science. Film ranking
is neither.
Apollo 13
(1995)
From our readers' enthusiastic responses, we have to conclude
that Apollo 13 's signature line, "Failure is not an
option," has worked its way into at least half the mission
statements in corporate America. And why not? The astronauts
and ground personnel in Ron Howard's space opera provide levelheaded,
creative leadership during a harrowing crisis. And if there's
a better example out there of managing a far-flung organization
(Texas, Florida, outer space), we haven't found it.
Gene Kranz (Ed
Harris), in charge of flight operations in Houston, and Jim
Lovell (Tom Hanks), commander of the 1970 Apollo lunar mission,
share leadership duties when there's an explosion on Lovell's
craft. These aren't guys with big dreams and inspirational
personalities; they're guys with an urgent problem that can
be solved only through teamwork, ingenuity, and clearheaded
direction. And they supply those attributes in spades. Kranz
drives his team of wired, bleary-eyed technicians to ever
greater lengths of inventiveness ("I suggest you gentlemen
invent a way to put a square peg in a round hole, rapidly"),
and Lovell oversees the implementation of the ground crew's
ideas by men under the most horrific stress imaginable.
But the film
is also about the role communication plays in leadership,
a subject both Kranz and Lovell appear to have thought through
carefully. By squelching intraoffice and intracapsule arguments,
never sharing incomplete or alarmist data, and maintaining
a constant verbal -- and emotional -- lifeline between those
on the ground and those off it, they maintain maximum control
in a chaotic situation. That, in turn, inspires confidence
among both crews. It's a crucial point: leaders certainly
desire loyalty and passion, but if they fail to win their
followers' confidence first, well, failure is not an option.
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